Musings on Modern Learning

Creative Writing

“Do you believe in something beautiful? Then get up and be it.” Ted Leo Kelly is on to something in the second draft of her This I Believe essay: A character, even if it is based off of oneself, is not real. His or her experiences don’t have to follow the way of the rules […]

My sister saw this poem scrawled on a wall in Saskatoon in the summer of 2010, and shared it with us when she got back. I copied it down and carried it around in a journal for a few months before turning it into this song: Graffiti Grafitti by Bryanjack

In brainstorming a way to synthesize the myriad tangents and threads being pursued in our recent study of rebellion and revolution in Egypt, as well as 1860s Manitoba, I wound up writing what began as a challenge to myself, and the Talons, to boil down the human affinity for stories of power, rebellion and freedom, […]

I know teachers tend to throw out mixed messages, “Be open, share. Be careful, be scared.” This could be an authentic real world experience to create something beautiful with a larger group of people than those within our immediate community. (I invite other teachers to share this Flickr set and this post to see where […]

Inspired by Grant Potter’s Prince George commute, I did a similar experiment in order to share a few minutes of transit in Port Moody. With a little help from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan’s Deep Dark Woods‘ “All the Money I had is gone.” Film aficionados may recognize the blur of the country store – just after I […]

In response to Chris Kennedy‘s recent post of British Columbian edu-bloggers, and in the spirit of referring my fellow bloggers (and blog-readers) to the people that I read, I thought of putting together a short list of a few noteworthy local student-bloggers. I hope that their blogs can further become hubs of communication around their […]

Sitting down to recast an updated listing of the RSS feeds, Twitter favourites, and podcasts I make a habit of perusing on a daily weekly monthly basis, I would be remiss to not isolate one of these sources of infotainment above the others — the unparallelled public radio institution that in all honesty, I cannot […]

After a few days of waiting to see what all the fuss was about, I finally saw Google’s Superbowl commercial. I had read Ira’s account of the narrative based in a series of Google searches, and was intrigued by the charm of the commercial is in its brisk, simple rendering of narrative through the universal […]

Yesterday I gave my class a brief quiz to assess their knowledge of the parts of speech, as well as sentence parts. Twenty questions, multiple choice, during the grammar unit. This is not, they tell me, fun stuff. And I’ll admit that putting together their quiz the night before, trying to come up with examples […]

International Musical Collaboration, Anyone? I continually find it interesting which songs become “the Songs” in my Intro to Guitar course. Composed of grades nine-through-eleven students, the class of thirty students represents every walk of life in our suburban highschool: choir and band kids adding to their repotoire of musical genius, athletes and academic high achievers […]